Destinations / tktktktk
The New
Environmentalists
Photo Credit
Local Goldman Prize filmmakers travel the world. Edited by Mimi Towle
56 n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 2 m a r i n
F
or nea rly 25 years, the Goldman Environmental Prize, founded by Richard and
Photo Credit
Rhoda Goldman, has honored one environmental activist each from Asia, Africa, North
America, South America, Europe and the island nations. In an annual ceremony at the
San Francisco Opera House, the six recipients — in recognition of their courage, creativity and drive — individually receive $150,000, which is typically spent to further their
causes. For the past decade, John Antonelli, Will Parrinello and Tom Dusenbery of the Mill Valley
Film Group, currently working out of a modest houseboat in Sausalito, have been commissioned
to travel to the winners’ homelands to document their stories. The filmmakers feel somewhat like
prizewinners themselves each November as they gather their gear to head out to another far-flung
corner of the world.
Although the team members wouldn’t trade their good fortune for anything, there are some
rather daunting challenges to the assignments. Antonelli more than once has had to enter an African country as
a tourist in order to film a subject the government didn’t approve of and then smuggle the raw footage out of the
country. Parrinello contracted dengue fever in Argentina this year, and Andy Black, one of their trusted directors of
photography, caught malaria. Two years ago, Dusenbery, his crew and equipment got stuck in Russian customs for
several days trying to get onto Sakhalin Island and had to trek across the frozen tundra in subzero weather to film
their subject. This year Dusenbery wanted no part of the Russia story.
Opposite page: Sofia Gatica
in the GMO soy fields of
Argentina. This page: The
2012 prizewinners at the
San Francisco Opera House.
Inset: The Goldmans.
m a r i n n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 2 57
Each member of the trio spends about a week
on the ground in a location, then heads back
home to edit the story and prep the next one. It
all works in kind of a tag-team fashion. When one
returns, another leaves.
“It’s a gross understatement to say that the
stories deserve much more than a week of shooting, and the final pieces, which are under four
minutes, could easily be much longer,” Antonelli
says. Prizewinners share “an unbridled optimism
about the work they are doing and have made
sacrifices that are unthinkable to most of us,” he
adds. “They are engaged in their cause purely for
their love of the planet and their drive to leave a
better place than they were born into.”
The complete series of some 60 short documentaries is called The New Environmentalists. Hosted
by Robert Redford and shown annually on KQED
TV, it has won three regional Emmy Awards. The
following are first-person accounts from filmmakers describing how their subjects were able to
make impacts in the areas where they live.
Left to right:
Filmmakers Tom
Dusenbery, Will
Parrinello and
John Antonelli
At first glance Evgenia Chirikova, a well-educated Russian mother, seems an unlikely environmental activist. She and her husband, Mikhail,
ran a successful engineering firm in Moscow. But they wanted to give their young daughters a better life, so they moved the family to Moscow’s
northern suburb of Khimki to be near the forest. When Chirikova discovered that the government planned to route the Moscow–St. Petersburg
highway through the old-growth Khimki forest, destroying it in the process, her life changed forever. “At first we thought it was some kind of a
mix-up. We were politically naive,” she says. “We said, ‘If we simply write to Putin he will fix this problem.’ ” Utilizing social media, Chirikova
organized protests in the forest. She and other activists threw themselves in front of bulldozers to defend the trees, often getting injured and
arrested in the process. The movement peaked in 2010 when 5,000 people attended a rally in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, the largest environmental protest in Russian history. This led to President Dmitry Medvedev’s announcement that he would halt construction of the highway and instead
study alternate routes. While Medvedev ultimately reinstated the highway’s construction, some environmental concessions were made. More
important, the huge rally was the beginning of what has become a broader popular movement to fight corruption in Russian politics.
As a mother, Evgenia
Chirikova cannot,
under Russian law,
be subjected to
administrative arrest
or jailed for longer
than three hours.
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all photos courtesy of the goldman environmental prize, except tim porter (above), Anton Belitsky (below)
Russia: Parrinello
Alaska: Dusenbery
Argentina:
Parrinello
GMO soy fields surround Sofia Gatica’s
barrio in Córdoba, Argentina. The crop
has become the economic engine driving
Argentina’s boom. But there’s a high cost for
Argentina’s poor, who are exposed to dangerous levels of the agrochemicals used to grow
the genetically modified soy. Crop dusters
spray the soy fields near Ituzaingó, Gatica’s
neighborhood, with thousands of gallons
of Monsanto’s Roundup product. When she
discovered the death of her infant daughter
was due to pesticide poisoning, she went
door-to-door and organized the Mothers of
Ituzaingó, who launched a “Stop Spraying”
campaign. The mothers led demonstrations
and published materials warning the public
about the dangers of agrochemicals. After 10
long years, the president ordered the minister
of health to investigate the effects of pesticide use in Ituzaingó. A definitive study by
the Department of Medicine at Buenos Aires
University linked glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, to birth defects
in amphibians. The doses used in the study
were far lower than those the residents of
Ituzaingó were exposed to. As a result, Gatica
and the mothers were able to get a municipal
ordinance passed prohibiting aerial spraying
at distances of less than 2,500 meters from
their homes. In an unprecedented victory,
a 2010 ruling from the country’s supreme
court not only banned agrochemical spraying near populated areas, but also reversed
the burden of proof — instead of residents
proving that spraying causes harm, the government and soy producers must now prove
the chemicals are safe.
From San Francisco, no fewer than four flights on progressively smaller airplanes carried me and my crew to Tikigaq, better known as Point Hope. The single paved runway stood
out like a black line in a sea of white ice and snow as we made our final approach. Remnants
of sod huts and whale bones left over from ancient gatherings punctuated the landscape on
either side of us. Around 700 people call this rugged settlement home. For hundreds, perhaps
thousands of years, hearty and determined native Inupiat Alaskans have lived off the Arctic
Sea. But recent efforts to open up the Chukchi Sea to oil exploration and drilling have put
the land, the people and the biodiversity of the region in grave danger. Not only would a spill
or leak like the one in the Gulf of Mexico be disastrous to the area, but getting to the site in
the long, dark winter would be nearly impossible. The U.S. Coast Guard itself admits that no
feasible plan to do so even exists. Caroline
Cannon was tagged by community elders to
spearhead efforts to stop any future plans
to drill or any new leases by the federal
government. They told her, “It’s your job to
save our land and the ocean, which is our
garden.” With those orders in hand and
heart, she has led a determined fight from
her coastal home, taking her to law offices
in Anchorage and finally to the halls of
Congress in Washington.
Above: Sophia Gatica
organizes concerned
mothers in Argentina.
This photo: Caroline
Cannon’s people chose
her to lead the fight
against oil drilling.
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The Philippines:
Dusenbery
When I met up with Rev. Edwin “Edu” Gariguez in Manila, we began our
journey by car south to the industrial port of Batangas. From there, a threehour ferry trip took us past a mere sampling of the Philippines’ more than
7,000 islands, then to our final destination of Mindoro. It is a genuine tropical
paradise whose indigenous peoples, fisheries, agriculture, water supply and
rain forests had been endangered by a proposed nickel mine. The eventual
salvation of this island had culminated in one final desperate push by Gariguez
and his supporters in the form of a 12-day hunger strike, back where our
trip had begun, at the front door of the nation’s environmental agency. The
government finally relented by denying mining permits on Mindoro. A rare
combination of tenacious determination and bravery tempered by a pure love
of and devotion to those of lesser means made Gariguez not only a success in
his struggle to stop the mine, but also a hero among many on the island.
Kenya: Antonelli
In February, I traveled to Africa to produce the story about the prizewinner in Kenya. Ikal Angelei, a 31-yearold Turkana native, was fighting to stop a massive dam from being built in Ethiopia that would severely impact
Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake on the planet. Kenya-born, U.S.–educated Angelei was elated about several
important victories she had recently achieved that seemed to at least slow down the $60 billion dam. Due to efforts
made by the group she formed, Friends of Lake Turkana, the African Development Bank withdrew its money
from the project, the Kenyan Parliament (her dad had been a member years ago) decided to stall its support of the
project and UNESCO declared Lake Turkana a World Heritage site. Once I set foot over there, the gravity of the
situation was shockingly clear. The lake is massive and it is the
lifeblood of the indigenous people who live near it. Other than the
lake, the entire region is a parched, brittle, unrelenting landscape.
Without the vital water source, the native people feel they will
have no chance to survive. Despite Angelei’s triumphs, the dam is
currently under construction and Angelei is still fighting the fight.
Top: It took a hunger strike for Edwin
Gariguez to stop the planned nickel
mine on his island. Bottom: Ikal
Angelei continues to fight efforts to
build a dam in Ethiopia.
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China: Antonelli
Ma Jun is the man behind the website that mobilized millions of his fellow Chinese residents to influence companies like Apple to clean up their supply chain, which has severely
polluted waterways and air quality. What is so impressive about Jun is his ability to work
with the government. Through IPE (Institute for Public and Institutional Affairs), he set up
a web-based interactive water pollution map giving people access to information not only
about how polluted their water is, but where the toxins are coming from. His main source
for the data is the Chinese government. He equipped the population with the information
they needed to participate in putting pressure on international corporations like Walmart,
Nike and Apple to clean up their acts. While we were in China shooting the piece, the story
about Apple’s toxic supply chain was hitting the media here in the United States. A news
story broke about one of Apple’s major suppliers, Foxconn, reporting that employees were
committing suicide due to the dismal working conditions in the massive factory. For the
next two months, while we were editing, the story began to build until virtually every major
news outlet was reporting on the issue. Coverage hit a high point when The Daily Show did
a piece about Foxconn. As each new story broke in the media, I was acutely aware that Jun
was the pebble in the lake that caused ripples across the entire planet.
This page: Ma Jun
created a website that
gave millions of his
fellow Chinese residents
valuable environmental
information.
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